Addison to Death!

[Kat Kanning]

Mark isn't a thug now.  Maybe he was when he was 17.  I don't know.  But here's a real live person we know that might have been put to death with all this revenge "justice" that's being bandied about.  Should he have died?

[AntonLee]

negatory, negatude, negative

[Hubbard]

Mark isn't a thug now.  Maybe he was when he was 17.  I don't know.  But here's a real live person we know that might have been put to death with all this revenge "justice" that's being bandied about.  Should he have died?

If I go out and kill your husband, do you want me to get a slap on the wrist? Then a slap on the butt and a do over?

[Kat Kanning]

Does doing something to you get me my husband back?

[Giggan]

Life in prison is a slap on the wrist? Really?

Now it's getting a little ridiculous...

[Hubbard]

Life in prison is a slap on the wrist? Really?

Now it's getting a little ridiculous...

Prison is shitty. I'll give you that. I know some folks who spent 10+ with the feds. But I bet life is a lot better than a death sentence.

[www]

Life in prison is a slap on the wrist? Really?

Now it's getting a little ridiculous...

Prison is shitty. I'll give you that. I know some folks who spent 10+ with the feds. But I bet life is a lot better than a death sentence.

A well known suicide method is to provoke a cop to shoot you. Works well in Texas, not so well in other states. Harris County Sheriffs department has the highest rate of fatal shootings by a police officer in the country. Second highest was Houston PD (which is in Harris County). Twice in about a year somebody with a medical emergency called 911. Instead of sending an ambulance they sent a cop, who shot them dead. I guess they figured it was cheaper that way. So, no, countless crimes end in either the criminal taking or losing their life, so for those they chose death over life, or have it chosen for them.

[www]

Ok, the copy of "The Roots of Evil", by Christopher Hibbert, I ordered arrived, and it's 524 pages, so it is easy to not remember everything exactly.

In the introduction he states "I have tried to show in this book...that Sir Samuel Romilly's belief, ['I call upon upon you to remember that cruel punishments have an inevitable tendency to produce cruelty in the people'], was a well founded one in 1813, had always been a well-founded one and is a well-founded one now."

He states that "Crime will always be with us", and believes that we need to seek out the cause of crime and not the consequence - "the least measure of progress with reforms which prevent crime is a hundred times more useful and profitable than the publication of an entire penal code". He also states that "the solution lies not in making punishments more severe, but in making them more certain and in relating them to each individual criminal, so that if he is reformable he may be reformed."

So he doesn't exactly say that police cause crime, but he does say that they make it a whole lot worse. The chapter, "Causes and Cures" concludes with "criminology should not be concerned with violations of laws but with violations of standards of conduct" and "no completely satisfactory answers have been found." It also indicates that we have lost a sense of fabric to society - families are not as cohesive as they were, and "there seems, indeed, no surer way of keeping a boy [or girl] from a life of crime than providing him [or her] with a full and happy and worthwhile childhood in a family which loves him [or her] and which he [or she] loves." "The respect, loyalty and affection as well as the sense of mutual responsibility and of a common purpose which a happy family life engenders were at the root of ancient methods of law enforcement in which the family was the smallest of various interdependent units. The strength of the family in that sense has largely gone. Nothing has been found to take its place, and so the problem of the young criminal continues and, indeed, seems to deepen."

I liked the description of one American family, the Jukes. "The originator of this remarkable clan was born in New York in the early eighteenth century, the descendant of Dutch settlers. He worked by fits and starts, drinking hard and whoring as often as he could afford to. He left behind him a large and mostly illegitimate family. Two of his sons married two of his five illegitimate daughters and over seven hundred descendants of these five daughters were traced. The vast proportion of them were criminals or prostitutes. Less than twenty of the men were skilled workmen and of these more than half learned their trades in prison."

The last chapter, "Progress and Palindrome" begins by quoting Cesare Beccaria, who in 1764 stated that "It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them", and a quote by Sydney and Beatrice Webb from 1922, "The most practical and the most hopeful of 'prison reforms' is to keep people out of prison altogether."

The final paragraph contains the statement "there are germs of evil in the best of us and seeds of good in the worst."

Speaking for myself, I have always thought that it would be cheaper to send someone caught for committing a crime to Harvard than to prison, and would produce better results. More recently I have learned of Buckminster Fuller's idea of giving every unemployed a stipend, so that they could do anything or nothing, with the idea that for every 100,000 given out, one would create something so valuable to society that it would pay for the remaining 99,999. In any case we do know that what we are doing now is so much not working that there is little point in pretending that it is having any positive effect.

[BillKauffman]

I have learned of Buckminster Fuller's idea of giving every unemployed a stipend, so that they could do anything or nothing, with the idea that for every 100,000 given out, one would create something so valuable to society that it would pay for the remaining 99,999. In any case we do know that what we are doing now is so much not working that there is little point in pretending that it is having any positive effect.

the libertarian author Charles Murray recently proposed a guaranteed basic income for all.

"In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State"

Jason Sorens also proposed something similar at Porq Fest 2 years ago.
http://freestateproject.org/about/essay_archive/cannae_tactic